That's unknown territory to me, but I'll see if I can find out where that bit of code is hidden.

[edit] Speaking about the stats of the simple lasers, any advice on what values to put will be very welcome.
I seldom use lasers so I have no good idea of what values to use...

Just don't forget that it's now possible to defend against them with smoke, water and shields.
From what I saw in the video, the target was undefended against lasers, you should try with a standard laser to see what damages it can deal by comparison.

I think simple laser and autocannon need to be normal citizen of the from the depth arsenal:

they both have the spool up/spool down mechanic, which no component (turret controller, failsafe, firing limit) can handle

they need to be moved to a load/cooldown mechanic, so that while functionally the same (fire fast for a bunch, then wait to reload a bunch) they start firing when the controller asks to fire and stop firing when the controller stops asking

I've never ran the number on the simple laser but I think nerfing it too much would make it useless at which point one could just remove it, if anything I'd halve the damage and double the range and double the ammunition cost for each shot - making it less drilly and costlier to operate while maintaining it as an useful weapon, comparable with the others in volume/damagexammo/running costs

From my experience I'd say the power of 100 is quite alright but the armor piercing value is too high. at 20 it can deal significant damage to metal and with 40 hits per second it'll melt metal.

A value of 5 might be about right, maybe 10 if they are meant to be quite powerful.
With 10 they will melt wood & alloy but 'only' deal 33% damage vs single layer metal and up.
With 5 they will be perfect for killing non-structure blocks (plus glass), work decently well at 50% damage vs wood & alloy and struggle at 17% damage vs single layer metal - which with 40 hits/s will still deal quite some damage, especially if used in large banks/clusters of simple lasers like on that vid...

it needs to remain unique tho, why have something that's just a simple variant of the autocannon? it's fine to have one simple weapon with high ap, it only needs not to melt metal without significant investment.

(2018-02-16, 10:03 AM)LoSboccacc Wrote: it needs to remain unique tho, why have something that's just a simple variant of the autocannon? it's fine to have one simple weapon with high ap, it only needs not to melt metal without significant investment.

I agree about the need for a simple weapon with high AP.
I may decrease it to 12-15, but not under.
I'll probably drop a bit the energy, but don't forget that smoke, laser shields and water will affect the simple lasers.

I never tried, but I'm pretty sure that a small standard laser melts anything if it isn't protected by smoke or a laser shield.

The stats for simple lasers are totally random.
Currently it has 100 power, 20 AP and a range of 500m.

[edit] Speaking about the stats of the simple lasers, any advice on what values to put will be very welcome.
I seldom use lasers so I have no good idea of what values to use...

Just don't forget that it's now possible to defend against them with smoke, water and shields.
From what I saw in the video, the target was undefended against lasers, you should try with a standard laser to see what damages it can deal by comparison.

Yes, but it's also an elite campaign vehicle. Needing them to all have smoke isn't a bad idea and I've never said "don't do this because you'll need to update the campaigns" because we've not reached the balancing content stage, but a lot of that vehicle was HA & got vapourized. The buildings cost 7k, and a lot of that was because I used HA around ammo stores.

This is what the equivalent proper laser looks like - uses ~6600 engine power. I'd need 12 of those per bunker and then 4 of the resulting creations to do a proper comparison. I've been using small "real" lasers for a while, but they take up an entire helicopter just for one weapon. There's also the issue that even at 500m making a laser hit the same block every pulse is a pretty difficult problem.

Perhaps start at the old stats ( 1600/second, so 40 dmg, 10 AP ) and then adjust? most people I come into contact with thought the old stats were a bit much, but there was no smoke defence either.

(2018-02-16, 12:10 PM)LoSboccacc Wrote: good job! we could start from that vehicle cost in rp and work backward to scale it for how much damage the simple laser should do (to be fair, simple laser + ammo boxes to keep it firing).

Damage per ammo consumed/time might be a nice metric; it's very hard to compare weapon systems ( how do you compare a simple laser to an APS HE shell? ) but at least you get a ballpark figure.